O Canada.
I’ve been spending a lot of time in Canada recently. Entirely in my head of course. Which is possibly the best place to explore a country, or a city as Calvino showed us in his invisible mindscapes.
I’ve arrived at my incorporate destination by following a trail of quite amazing debut short story collections: Laura Boudreau, Alexander Macleod, Anne Perdue, D.W. Wilson. They’re fantastic debuts, but they’ve also been extremely useful for helping me build the psychic space of O Canada in my head.
I didn’t realise how much I needed an O Canada until I started to constitute it. My OC has a partially similar function to God Defend New Zealand (GDNZ) in that it serves as an unfathomed antumbra of a complacently fathomed mental representation (Australia in the case of GDNZ, America for OC).
In OC I can have all the tropes and rhythms, all the late-Capitalist botheration and goose bumps that I dearly love in American fiction, but with some sort of shimmery, destabilising overlay which I haven’t fully understood yet.
It’s almost Lynchian, but not necessarily dark and twisted, even if it does have the feel of a literary deepweb or darkweb space hidden under the surface of www.allthestuffyouknow.com.
Perhaps it can more crudely deconstructed as a pseuds-corner need to be one or two steps ahead of the pack: “Well yes, dahling, there’s some splendid work coming out of the 20 under 40 crew, but what have you read from Canada recently? Oh nothing? Well…”
Well, here’s a good place to start.
And what a boon to have this breathing-thinking-writing Canadian in the shape of Laura Boudreau who actually lives (+ breathes, thinks, writes) in my city, happy to read me one of her equally commendable contemporaries (Rebecca Rosenblum) and talk with a Canadian accent into my digital recorder.
Needless to say, I have yet to be able to distinguish an OC accent from any other North American variety, but I’m working on it O Canada, forgive me.
BTW: If you’re in London in September, you’ll be pleased to know that Laura is attending our Canadian Debuts Bookclub/Salon at Camden Arts Centre. She may even sign the odd copy or two if you ask her nicely.
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ALL first aid rooms in schools feel like this. Tomb- like, dim and deathly. I hate them. Great story with a lot of wit and lightness masking the seriousness of the subject.
Being from Canada, I think the “no-whining, you have a job to do” attitude portrayed in this story is peculiarly Canadian. It is what causes the woman in the story to internalize all of her difficulties . It says a lot about our culture in Canada, and our very suppressive attitude towards emotions. The office, the cardigan, and the forms are symbolic, I think, of this attitude, while the woman’s art and her other life are symbolic of the emotions lurking beneath the surface, despite attempts to suffocate them and keep smiling. The presence of this attitude, and the control it has over the woman reminds me of some of Mavis Gallant’s stories, especially “Voices Lost in Snow.”
A fascinating insight into the story. Thank you lily for putting fingers to keyboard to voice that. It’s funny you should mention Voices Lost in Snow, as that is indeed another wonderful story up on the site, as read by Rosalind Harvey. Have you had a chance to listen to it yet?