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
Is It Wrong to Flog Books on Facebook?
Now that my book tour is almost over, I am doing most of my publicity for my new novel through online marketing. And I feel downright awkward about asking fb comrades to buy my book. For instance, is fb the right place to sell books? Like most of my friends, I ignore fb ads–in fact, all online ads– and yet I find myself still doing this kind of self-promotion and feeling ashamed.
My queasy feelings led me to a blog by Paulo Coelho, perhaps the most famous online author in the world, with millions of followers. (http:/paulocoelhoblog/com) He says we are living through another technological revolution that’s comparable to Gutenburg and the printing press.
Coelho also says that writers are afraid of social networks and they don’t have to be because the networks offer contact with readers, and that for the writer, is food for the soul. “We are living a new Renaissance, if only we could see it …We do not like being romantic, but romanticism is here again …where people start both thinking and sharing differently…”
I had a humble feeling writing The Western Light. I felt like I was a solo voice in the swarm of humanity and my voice just happened to be telling a story and that maybe my story could speak for a lot of other voices. When I wrote my other novels, I felt like I was writing for a literary audience. My old literary feeling seems to have gone. Why? Maybe Paul Coelho is right. We are thinking and sharing differently so my notion of myself as a novelist is morphing into something less familiar but nonetheless satisfying. Get over yourself, I hear myself saying. You always were a voice among millions–you just didn’t encounter dramatic proof of this fact before the Internet. It doesn’t mean what you have to say is any less vital.
So I like Coelho’s idea of a new romantic age. But is flogging my novel on Facebook OK? What do you think? I’m still puzzling that out.
What Only the Peacock Knows
Do Teachers learn from Their Students?
Last week end, one of my former students, Canadian playwright, Paul Ciufo, interviewed me at a book event in Bayfield, Ontario. We kicked off the evening with Santa Claus and the lighting of the Christmas lights in the town square, and then Paul and I went back to the Village Book Shop, which is run by its new owner Mary Brown. One of the first questions Paul asked was about a remark I’d made in a creative writing workshop at York University.
“You need to tell me something that only the peacock knows,” Paul said, quoting my feedback on his short story about a peacock.
He said my remark had haunted him as a playwright and what on earth did I mean? At first, I hemmed and hawed. Had I given Paul bad advice? Shouldn’t I have given him more information instead of making mysterious pronouncements about peacocks?
Flummoxed, I took a stab at what I had meant twenty years ago when he had been a promising and talented student in my class. “We need narrators who are like us and not like us so we have room to invent,” I replied. Paul looked at me blankly. I went on. “And students tend to offer a long and often cliched laundry list of descriptive details about a character instead of finding the specific, defining details that let us see who their character is. So I wanted you to tell me specific things about the peacock. Instead of using vague, general language to describe your peacock.”
Paul still looked puzzled, and I knew this wasn’t what I had meant at all. So what had I been going on about?
Reflecting on our conversation this morning, it strikes me that I was telling Paul what writers do. Our job is not only describing what our character knows but what is special about what our character knows. And in each case, it is up to the writer to find out that special knowledge and convey it. The writer can express this in a variety of ways, through an image or a metaphor, or an inner dialogue of some kind.
And that reminds me of something that Thornton Wilder once said, that an artist’s job is to reveal the truth and hide it at the same time. And what did Wilder mean by that? Only the peacock knows.
More Magazine Reviews Susan Swan’s The Western Light
This month in More Magazine four authors look at love, lineage, and, most of all, loss.
Click the image to read:
Making the Calgary Festival Scene
Just arrived in Calgary for Wordfest which this year has 70 writers and 65 events over six days in Calgary and Banff. Flew in with Julie Wilson, author of Seenreading, who was herself reading a new hot novel titled Malarky along with Russell Wangersky, whose book Whirl Away was shortlisted for the Giller. Good discussion in taxi ( kindly driven by Dennis a thoughtful festival volunteer who listened in) about the merits of Facebook versus Twitter, with Facebook coming out on top because Facebook allows for more discussion. Twitter, said my colleagues, often just repeats what an in group has already decided to think about a certain subject, whether it is politicos or literati speaking to each other.
Another bon mot, this time from Julie Wilson who says it is no longer enough just to win the Giller; the writing community gets excited when there is the possibility of a triple win with the Rogers Trust and the GG fiction awards. Food for thought. Writing books as a sport takes a new up twist. Yikes.
- Julie Wilson with her new book Seenreading
Swan’s Q and A on The Western Light
1. In this novel, you’ve returned to the narrator, Mouse Bradford, in your bestseller, The Wives of Bath. Why?
Mouse Bradford is my favourite alter ego. She appeared in The Wives of Bath first. But you don’t have to have read that novel to understand The Western Light. In this book, Mouse tries and fails to get her father’s attention so she turns to a dubious father substitute, Gentleman John Pilkie, the ex-NHL hockey player sent to the local asylum after murdering his wife and child. He’s an ambiguous character who’s emotionally present for Mouse when her own father is too busy working. Is somebody who gives themselves to their community and neglects their family a good role model? That’s one of the questions I explore in The Western Light.
2. Where did Mouse come from?
I knew a girl at school like Mouse. She was shy and walked with a limp. But she had an authority that the other students who were striking poses lacked. And yet she couldn’t play sports. She had a weak leg and she needed to accept her limitations so she could navigate her schoolgirl world. Does accepting what makes you vulnerable help to grow courage? Maybe so.
3. The fifties play a big part in this novel. Toronto reviewer Susan Cole said: “… where Swan’s experience speaks most tellingly is in The Western Light’s vivid evocation of life in the 1950’s and its essential signifiers: the clothes, the hair, the telephone party lines and the all-out-hate-on-between fans of the Montreal Canadians.” Was it nostalgic to write about that time period for you?
I hated the fifties when I was growing up because I was extremely tall and interested in books and ideas when girls were supposed to be breezy five-foot-two cheerleaders. But looking back on it, I realized there were progressive things going on, like the emergence of rock and roll, which gave a voice to young people in a way that hadn’t been done before in human history. And there was optimism, lots of it, and not the cynicism young people experience now living inside a global culture with more competition and a bottom line mind set that wants to run everything like a business, including education.
4. Hockey and concussions are part of the plot in The Western Light. Have the attitudes to hockey concussions changed much since the days you write about?
The NHL still doesn’t give players a penalty for a headshot. The penalty is for deliberate intent to injure and that’s hard to judge. The biggest difference now is the salaries the NHL players make and their pensions. In the 1950’s, salaries were small and there were no pensions. Injured players were discarded without compensation; in some ways, those players were gladiators without rights.
5. Is The Western Light a 1950’s hockey novel?
Another title for this novel could be Girls and Men because Mouse is trying to understand men, especially her own father, and in Canada anyway, understanding men is going to involve understanding hockey. The game is how Canadians express the aggressive side of our character. My usually compassionate father turned into a raging maniac if the calls were going against the Toronto Leafs. Once he smashed a man’s hat in at Maple Leaf Gardens. Another time he climbed up and over the wire fence behind the Habs goal and threatened the referee. So a girl like Mouse Bradford has to figure out how to fit into this male world and decide what she thinks of it. And her relationships with her neglectful country doctor father and the ex-NHL hockey star Gentleman John Pilkie help her to figure this out.
Susan Swan’s Fall Book Tour Schedule for The Western Light
Here it is–a fall of national literary festivals and Ontario bookstores since The Western Light is set on the Georgian Bay and in Oil Springs and Petrolia. The pub date for reviews has been moved to September 22. With more events to come. (I will be taking lots of ginseng):
Upcoming publicity and events:
Thursday October 4 – Not So Nice Italian Girls reading (College St., Toronto)
http://www.openbooktoronto.com/events/not_so_nice_italian_girls_and_friends_swan
Tuesday, Oct. 9 — WordFest “WordFeast” Fundraising Event, River Café, Calgary, 6pm
http://www.wordfest.com/festival/wordfeast/
Wednesday, Oct. 10 — WordFest “Wednesday Night Showcase” Vertigo Theatre Centre, Playhouse, Calgary, 7pm
http://www.wordfest.com/event/44-how-should-a-writer-be/
Saturday, Oct. 13,— WordFest “How Should a Writer Be?” The Banff Centre, The Kinnear Centre KC-303, Banff, 1:30pm
http://www.wordfest.com/event/15-wednesday-night-showcase/
Sunday, Oct. 14 — WordFest “Worldly Words: Canadian and International,” The Banff Centre, The Kinnear Centre -KC 203, Banff, 3:30pm
http://www.wordfest.com/event/51-worldly-words/
Monday Oct. 15 and Tuesday Oct. 16 – WordFest Summit Salon in Banff
http://www.banffcentre.ca/programs/program.aspx?id=1299
Thurs Oct 18 — Vancouver International Writers’ Festival panel event with short reading, 8pm (Event #40,Waterfront Theatre)
http://www.writersfest.bc.ca/at-a-glance/2012festival
Fri Oct 19 — Vancouver International Writers’ Festival, reading, 8pm (Event #51 Performance Works)
http://www.writersfest.bc.ca/at-a-glance/2012festival
Wednesday October 23 – 7pm reading at Wordsworth Books in Waterloo, with Tamas Dobozy
http://www.wordsworthbooks.com/Tamas%20Dobozy.htm
Sunday, October 28 - IFOA Harbourfront—2pm Round Table discussion: Reading Like a Writer, Lakeside Terrace (Moderator: Antanas Sileika)
http://www.readings.org/?q=ifoa/round_table_reading_like_a_writer
Monday, October 29 – IFOA Ontario – Reading in Parry Sound, 7:30pm
http://www.litontour.com/events/ifoa-parry-sound-2
Friday, November 2 – IFOA Ontario – Reading/interview in Midland, 7:30pm
http://www.litontour.com/events/ifoa-midland-3
Tuesday, December 4 – Reading at Different Drummer in Burlington, 9am
http://www.differentdrummerbooks.ca/a_different_drummer_books/Home.html
Monday, December 10-Tuesday, December 11 – Speeches at Sultan Bin Zayed’s Culture and Media Centre, Abu Dhabi
Heroines of the Sexual Gothic Celebrates the Toronto Women’s Bookstore
Coralie (left) of the Billie Hollies and Susan Swan (right) at Heroines of the Sexual Gothic
On Thursday June 7th, Canadian author Susan Swan and the all girl folk-noir quartet, the Billie Hollies, delighted a packed house at The Toronto Women’s Bookstore with the forty-minute performance reading: Heroines of the Sexual Gothic.
Why celebrate? Because the Toronto Women’s Bookstore is back and better than ever with an array of new features: an Espresso bar and lounge, summer patio, writing workshops as well as a reference library of important feminist and queer theory texts. The store also sells books for university courses in these disciplines.
The first writing workshop will be led by Toronto fiction writer Zoe Whittail.
The new owner Victoria Moreno explains that the new features have been designed to make her store more community oriented, and she encourages visitors to drop in for a coffee and browse.
“In an age of increased commercialization, women’s stories and histories can be easily marginalized,” Swan says, explaining her support for the store. “But stores like this offer an important counterpoint. Why should we be obliged to re-invent the wheel with each generation?”
During the event, Swan discussed her intimate relationship with three of her best-known characters, including Mouse Bradford, who appears in The Western Light, Swan’s new novel, which will be published early this fall. The Billie Hollies are popular newcomers to the Toronto music scene. Their latest CD is Light of Mind.
Thank you to all who came to the event and everyone that helped make it such a success.
Three shades of sex talk: female writers on the challenges of erotic fiction
This article is featured in the Globe and Mail June 2, 2012 and can be found at www.theglobeandmail.com
SHEILA HETI, SUSAN SWAN, ZOE WHITTALL
Sheila Heti: I find most books still shockingly puritanical. Can we try to understand why this is?
Susan Swan: Does it come from a traditional Christian suspicion of the body? Let’s face it: Canada has a long tradition of Presbyterian Scots who saw sex and the body as sinful.
I’m reading Fifty Shades of Grey – not just for entertainment, but to see if its depictions of women having orgasms resonates with me. Usually, with such books, there is a degree of faux artifice that follows the portrayals of sex in Hollywood movies. Many women writers fall into writing a version of that. First, one or two kisses, some gropings and then mutual orgasms. I think this romance code is a hard thing to shake. Maybe both men and women long for sex to be snappy and smooth, or women still hesitate to tell men that getting them aroused takes longer than it does for a man.
Zoe Whittall: I think if the writing is good in and of itself, and you respond to it, then it’s good sex writing. There is no fixed way to write sex well, just as there are no fixed ways to write a job interview or a car explosion well. If you’ve avoided the clichés and are being real and aren’t all freaked out as a writer about what you’re writing, then that is a place to start. So if bored housewives are scandalized by mild S/M in Fifty Shades of Grey, but I find it tame, that’s just the way it is.
Swan: When it comes to bad sex writing, I think the reason most men are going to have a trickier time coming up with compelling, authentic descriptions of women’s experiences of sex is a lack of knowledge about female nature. Both sexes are still discovering what female nature is. Traditional attitudes to women, reflected in 19th-century science, have been based in prejudice or wish fulfilment, so how could male writers get it right? When I was a young woman, feminist theory insisted that women weren’t that different from men. Now researchers like Louann Brizendine, in her bestseller The Female Brain, says that the neurochemical make-up of women makes us very different from men, in the ways we experience language, being a parent and sex.
Whittall: Theorists like Brizendine are popular because they simplify gender and use some easy-to-dispute neuroscience to traffic in stereotypes and reaffirm from a biological-determinism perspective that all women feel one way about sex and all men feel another. Gender isn’t fixed in this way.
Heti: One of my favourite books about sex is U.S. writer Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick. What excited me about her approach is that the book is so suffused with desire, yet the characters have sex only once, late in the book. I like it when a writer shows sex as embedded in life. This is different from “sex scenes,” which read weird to me. Sex is so much closer to our humanity than scenes. It’s as if writers put in “thinking scenes” or “relating scenes.”
Swan: I think that’s why Henry Miller wrote about sex so well. He was trying to say, this is how I experience life, and myself with my favourite women.
To read the full article please click HERE.